WIMN’s Voices, the women’s media monitoring group blog, features a diverse online community of fifty women blogging on media coverage of women and a range of social, cultural and political issues every day.Click here to learn more about the diversity and philosophy of WIMN’s Voices.

Regular readers of WIMN’s Voices know that I’m working on a book on gender (and race and class) issues in reality TV. The working title is, Bachelors, Bridezillas and Beautiful Corpses: Unraveling Reality TV’s Twisted Fairy Tales.

I’m taking the same thorough research approach with this reality TV book as I bring to all the news media analysis I do for Women In Media & News — reading hundreds of articles in Nexis.com news database searches every time I do a critique of inaccuracy in trend stories, etc. — which means that I need to watch endless amounts of mind-numbingly boring, exploitative, degrading and bigoted so-called “unscripted” programming.

I know, trust me I know. Before you offer to buy me some bourbon to help numb the pain, there’s something I’d prefer from you, dear reader. Reality TV shows on DVD. Anyone have any? I’m looking for everything from box sets (ideal) to one-off episodes of any of the series listed below — any others you might have on hand that might suggest. I currently have around five years worth of episodes — probably thousands of hours — of reality TV shows, but they’re all on VHS tapes. Hundreds and hundreds of old, some even unmarked, hard to fast-forward through VHS tapes. They’re difficult to work with, and it would be a huge boon to the research process & a great time saver if I had more of this stuff on DVD.

So, fess up. Anyone have a secret addiction to “America’s Next Top Model,” “American Idol,” “The Apprentice,” “The Bachelor” or “Age of Love“? Did anyone’s nerdy younger brother burn all the episodes of “Are You Hot: The Search for America’s Sexiest People” onto DVD because he was too young to buy porn and it was an easy prime-time network substitute? Do any of you have a hook-up at TelevisionWithoutPity or any of those reality TV fan forum recap sites, where folks tape this stuff religiously?

I don’t care if they’ve been watched before - used is fine. Personally recorded is fine (hell, better you burned a DVD from TV than gave Fox or ABC your cash, right?)

OH - and if anyone has any footage from the Texas news station that hired a WWE wrestler and bikini model to “anchor” a month’s worth of “news” as the groundwork for an upcoming Fox reality show called “Anchorwoman” — send it to me! I’d be your best friend…

Please circulate this call as far and wide as possible. The research process will be so much less painful if I can replace these horrible, space-wasting, impossible-to-wade-through video tapes with easy DVDs. Anyone who helps will get thanked in the book! (As if me being your BFF isn’t enough…)

Got reality show DVDs you’d rather put to good use, or leads on a friend who does? Lemme know. Email
info[at]wimnonline[dot]org